Last night I encountered SuperCollider: an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. Great sounds, complex possibilities of composition and as well: live sound processing. Could be very useful for our ‘cotidianity 3.0’. I couldn’t find out if it offers as well possibilities of real time image processing … somewhere i saw that it is possible to connect it with Processing to be able to do both: sound and image. A huge field opens …

I have been thinking recently on radio technology and its possibilities before it was commercialized with the institution of broadcasting. Bertolt Brecht wrote a very compelling argument on the uses of radio for art, interaction, and pedagogy. The title of this text is “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” and I want to share here some excerpts that I scrapped:

“As for the radio’s object, I don’t think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.”

“Radio is one sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organise its listeners as suppliers.”